Wednesday, July 25th

Learning how to do this blog thing. I ended up posting two days today. So first you will see today's and then below it is yesterday's. Two chances to bore you!

Wednesday promises to be a better day. We leave Winnipeg's 600,000 residents bright and early, headed for Regina, Saskatchewan. Well, wait, just a few shots of the Canadian Mint before we leave. The cloud cover needs to dissipate a bit and then we’ll click a few. Two hours later, we are on the road to Regina.

Hwy 1 West reminds you of the Great Plains. Kilometer after kilometer of farms. Train tracks lie adjacent to the road, hugging the farms fields. Coupled with abundant silos, the farms await an empty box car or two.

Fuel costs are not as high as we had anticipated. After calculating the exchange rate and converting from liters to gallons, we paid $2.98 per gallon of diesel. We paid $2.75 at home. Hard to believe that we would consider almost $3.00 a gallon a great price.

From Winnipeg to Regina, we are looking at almost 600 kilometers (370 miles). Ah, the great pursuit of another provincial capitol building. There is a market for those images, so we photograph them.

We arrived in Regina around 4:00 PM. We are now on Mountain Time, but our heads are still on Eastern Time. We headed downtown for a glimpse of the capitol building. The building is pretty, but the flower gardens surrounding it are even more beautiful. Did you know that Saskatchewan has only been a province for a little over 100 years? It became a province in 1905. They have an incredible statue of Queen Elizabeth (she visited there in 1959) on her horse. The horse was born and bred in Saskatchewan. Apparently she rode that horse until 1987. Yikes.

Regina is due north of the border between North Dakota and Montana. It has a population of 178,000. Not as cosmopolitan as Winnipeg, nor as diverse, but still a beautiful place to visit.

Tomorrow, we head to Edmonton, Alberta, via Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.